the core of rationalism that i most appreciate is the belief that it is actually possible to get better at finding the truth, and that it is worthwhile to try. it’s understandable why not all people want to—it involves biting surprisingly many bullets, and is not the happiest way to live life. but i am willing to bite those bullets.
so many people believe that truth is secondary to happiness or social harmony; or they think having good epistemology is so hopeless that we shouldn’t even try; or they have some big anti-epistemological brainworm like religion or politics; or they see a single visible failure of trying to improve epistemology and immediately conclude that all attempts to think better are cooked (eg maybe the old way of thinking has some unobvious benefit, and when you change things it breaks in an unexpected way); or they realize that explicit chain of thought is not how a large chunk of human cognition is and jump all the way to the conclusion that nothing can even be modelled usefully.
you can simply try to understand things, and try to understand yourself as a thing! and when you fail, you can analyze that, try again, repeat! you can surface the hypothesis that your own cognition is heavily biased in a certain way, and the hypothesis that a specific intervention will fix it, and others who disagree can explain in natural language why they think it will fail, or why the framework of requiring a specific reason to fail is the wrong framework here, or why you are likely to systematically misestimate whatever. words are great, use them
There is an exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff here that this misses, though. Exploration here is the act of improving our understanding of the world, and exploitation is utilising that understanding to do what you actually want, like being happy and stuff. Also, this exploration can be very costly (in terms of willpower) for some people, but others actually enjoy this exploration process.
Exploring and exploiting are more interdependent than toy models like the n-armed bandit allow for. The time to eat your brain, like Dennett’s sea squirt, is when you are sure that your world will never change again, i.e. never, especially in the accelerated times we are living through. Always be exploring; exploiting furnishes the resources to explore more.
the core of rationalism that i most appreciate is the belief that it is actually possible to get better at finding the truth, and that it is worthwhile to try. it’s understandable why not all people want to—it involves biting surprisingly many bullets, and is not the happiest way to live life. but i am willing to bite those bullets.
so many people believe that truth is secondary to happiness or social harmony; or they think having good epistemology is so hopeless that we shouldn’t even try; or they have some big anti-epistemological brainworm like religion or politics; or they see a single visible failure of trying to improve epistemology and immediately conclude that all attempts to think better are cooked (eg maybe the old way of thinking has some unobvious benefit, and when you change things it breaks in an unexpected way); or they realize that explicit chain of thought is not how a large chunk of human cognition is and jump all the way to the conclusion that nothing can even be modelled usefully.
you can simply try to understand things, and try to understand yourself as a thing! and when you fail, you can analyze that, try again, repeat! you can surface the hypothesis that your own cognition is heavily biased in a certain way, and the hypothesis that a specific intervention will fix it, and others who disagree can explain in natural language why they think it will fail, or why the framework of requiring a specific reason to fail is the wrong framework here, or why you are likely to systematically misestimate whatever. words are great, use them
There is an exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff here that this misses, though. Exploration here is the act of improving our understanding of the world, and exploitation is utilising that understanding to do what you actually want, like being happy and stuff. Also, this exploration can be very costly (in terms of willpower) for some people, but others actually enjoy this exploration process.
Exploring and exploiting are more interdependent than toy models like the n-armed bandit allow for. The time to eat your brain, like Dennett’s sea squirt, is when you are sure that your world will never change again, i.e. never, especially in the accelerated times we are living through. Always be exploring; exploiting furnishes the resources to explore more.
They don’t have to be one or the other for there to be a tradeoff!